Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- Veluti in Speculum (As in a Looking Glass) -- The Mirror in the Middle: Mme de Thémines’s Letter in Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves -- The Prévan Cycle as Pre-Text in Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses -- The Frame and the Framed: Mirroring Texts in Balzac’s Facino Cane -- Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une Page d’histoire: Incest as Mirror Image -- Reversals and Disappearance: Georges Rodenbach’s L’Ami des miroirs and Bruges-la-morte -- Man Mirrors Toad, or Vice-Versa: Decadent Narcissism in Jean Lorrain’s Oeuvre -- The Wheel of Fortune as Mirror: André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s La Motocyclette -- Kaleidoscopic Reflections in Guise of a Conclusion: Close, Maupassant, Douglas, and Borges.

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Mirrors are mesmerizing. The rhetorical figure that represents a mirror is called a chiasmus , a pattern derived from the Greek letter X (Chi). This pattern applies to sentences such as “one does not live to eat ; one eats to live .” It is found in myths, plays, poems, biblical songs, short stories, novels, epics. Numerous studies have dealt with repetition, difference, and Narcissism in the fields of literature, music, and art. But mirror structures, per se , have not received systematic notice. This book analyses mirror imagery, scenes, and characters in French prose texts, in chronological order, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. It does so in light of literal, metaphoric, and rhetorical structures. Works analysed in the traditional French canon, written by such writers as Laclos, Lafayette, and Balzac, are extended by studies of texts composed by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Georges Rodenbach, Jean Lorrain, and Pieyre de Mandiargues. This work appeals to readers interested in linguistics, French history, psychology, art, and material culture. It invites analyses of historical and ideological contexts, rhetorical strategies, symmetry and asymmetry. Ovid’s Narcissus and Alice in Wonderland are paradigms for the study of micro and macro-structures. Analyses of mirrors as cultural artefacts are significant to Lowrie’s sight seeing .

In English; with some texts in French.